After making it far enough south and deciding to turn around I was cruising north, listening to Boston, hands resting lightly on the tops of the handlebars when I noticed I was overtaking a couple young kids riding single file on their bmx bikes.  On this segment of trail, which runs directly adjacent to the San Gabriel River, the river is completely concrete with a steep concrete slope at probably 45 degrees from the top of the trail to the bottom of the “river”.  Because the speed difference between the kids and myself was pretty high (I was going about 20mph and coming up on them pretty fast), I moved my hands down to the hoods so that I had access to the brakes in the unlikely event that it became necessary.

It became necessary.

When I was about 10 feet behind them on the left side about to pass, the kid in front swerved to the left completely blocking my way. I hit the brakes hard and only just managed to skid to a halt before making contact with the other bike, but when I then suddenly wasn’t moving and was still clipped in to my pedals, I started to fall to the side. The same side as the steep slope down to the bottom of the river. Luckily, I managed to unclip one foot and land on that foot, and do a sort of bounce-jump-slide down a few feet of the slope before regaining my balance and expending all my kinetic energy.

A similar place on the trail to where I almost tumbled down

As all of this is happening, I make eye-contact with the kid, who I would guess is about 12, and he has a look of absolute terror on his face and immediately averts his eyes. I’m not sure if his fear is that I’ll go tumbling down the slope or that I’m going to yell at him… but when I manage to stop myself from falling all the way down, I burst into laughter.  It was like one of those 90′s morphing pictures when the kid transformed from terror to a really big smile. “That is my worst fear of riding this trail – rolling all the way to the bottom,” I said with a smile on my face. Both him and his friend said “sorry” a few times, I told them no harm done and to try and be more careful in the future. As I clip in to take off again, the kid says “have a nice day,” and then I’m off.

I could easily have been angry and yelled at the kid, but then everyone is upset and nobody wins. Sure, my bike has a few new scratches on it (its first scratches, actually) but in the scheme of things it really wasn’t a big deal.

I try really hard to keep myself in a place where events that are “bad” can fall into the “not a big deal” category.

Earlier this year, we ran out of cash at the non-VC-funded startup I work for.  Obviously, this meant that we were unable to make payroll for a couple pay periods. But luckily (not that luck had anything to do with it), I was in a place where I could make the decision whether to go find another job or stick it out while not getting paid because I believed in the overall goals and future of the company. I decided to stay, and now things are better than they’ve ever been. And though my jokes about not getting paid may not have seemed funny at the time, in the scheme of things it was not a big deal.

I’m hoping that going forward in life that I can continue to file bad things under “not a big deal” but still continue to get excited about the good things when they happen.

This is what I have come to recognize as the cause of my current state of discontent.  I have been doing a lot of self-reflection lately, which of course only happens when I have too much time for self-reflection.  My preference is to occupy myself with exciting (read: cutting edge, innovative) projects rather than silly introspection.

Now, it’s true that I have done several things this year with which I’m quite satisfied.  I’ve started making some good friends here in LA as the two-year anniversary of my moving west has come and gone.  We added the Atlanta Braves as yet another flagship Photocore client. I was involved in launching a free career assessment aimed at helping young people understand themselves and find their ideal job (more about that later).  But none of these satisfy my basal thirst for innovation.

I’ve had a handful of ideas germinating for a while, some of which have made it to concept or design phases.  And except for the one idea was pre-empted by Google (damn them!), they are viable business ideas and with enough effort they might be profitable.  But while “profitability” is on my list of positive adjectives for a a crazy idea, “fun”, “interesting” and “innovative” are higher on that list.

I would rather be involved in something unique than something profitable.

The two full-time jobs that I’ve worked since graduation were both companies that I chose for other than monetary reasons.  In the first case, I turned down an offer for a significantly higher salary to work at a promising small company that was doing very cool things in the area of IPTV and social networking.  Then, when I decided to leave that company, I happily took a cut to work with a company who had grand ideas about how to revolutionize their market.  I saw the opportunity to help the company take those great ideas from concept to execution and that really got me excited.

People who are smarter than me probably already are intimately familiar with what motivates them.  For me, I had some sort of mental block on the whole thing.  So I, rather accidently, went another route.

Recently, I took two very different career/personality assessments.

The first was the Lipson-Shiu Corporate Type Test – a spoof on that Myers-Briggs personality test.  After twelve questions it announced that I was ICIG (the Entrepreneur) which is defined as

“A bubbling energetic type often with boundless energy and a short attention span. Has a pattern of getting enthused about a project, starting it up and leaving the rest to others.”

I think it totally pegged me – surprisingly for a test written as a spoof – as a person who likes to start something big and leave the details to someone else while I start on something else.  I could never work at a large company maintaining software.  Running naked from an axe murderer in a room full of cacti would be a preferable fate.  This assessment gets an “A” for accuracy and a gold star in the plays-well-with-others column.

The second assessment I took was the YSN Self-Assessment.  This is a seriously serious assessment build by a crack team of authors, recruiters, scientists and engineers (including me!)  It didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t already know, but it did distill a few things for me that I hadn’t characterized so simply.  Among other things, the assessment measures your “values” which are evidently the things that motivate you to do what you do.  Based on a 30 minute Q&A session on the website, it tells you how your values stack up.  My strongest value? Uniqueness.  Next? Knowledge.  Ok, next? Anti-Structure.  Money is 5th out of 6. And I think that pretty much explains exactly what makes me tick.

Here are a few choice snippets from the premium version of my report:

• Your creativity is not constrained by criticism from others.
• You have a high energy level and work hard at meeting goals.
• You have a knack for creating solutions sometimes more through personal attempts, calculated risks, and creativity than in the book or established procedures.

Yes – I don’t care what other people thing about my ideas or opinions. Yes – when I’m excited about a goal I will hit it with no equivocation.  Yes – I can’t stand doing things by-the-book.  “A” for accuracy here too, and I can’t take any of that credit because I didn’t invent the science, I just automated it.

So how did both of these assessments actually help me?

Well, I can’t honestly say that they helped me in any concrete way, but they did get me thinking in different terms. They confirmed that for the remaining 209 days of this year I need to be working on things that excite me.  It means no more watching a season or two of some TV show over the weekend.  No more busywork. No more laziness. No more sleeping unless absolutely necessary.

Oh, and maybe I’ll write more blog posts too.

UPDATE: It has come to my attention that I may have given the impression that I work for peanuts just so that I can do cool things. That’s not true, I get what I would consider an industry-standard salary for my position.  What I was trying to impart is that there are things more important to me than money when making career and project decisions.  When you have just enough money to live the lifestyle that you desire, then you can really focus on choosing things that make you happy.  I’ve been fortunate enough to have more employement options than some, so I have been able to be picky about what I choose to do.  Money can’t buy you love, and at least in my case, money can’t buy me job satisfaction.